How-To Geek

Your Android phone's USB-C port is incredibly versatile. If you've only been using it to charge your phone to the point where you practically call it a charging port, you'll be surprised by just how many cool gadgets you can plug into it.

Have you ever struggled to install obscure software? You try your distro's software repositories first, falling back to community repositories. Sometimes you fail, and it's not on the Snap Store or Flathub either, so you manually download it from GitHub as a last resort. There is a better way, and I'll show you how.

Spotify has slowly expanded beyond audio, most notably with video podcasts, and now music videos are now rolling out to more subscribers. It looks a lot like how YouTube Music works.

Buying a new Toyota Camry is a perfectly reasonable choice. It’s affordable, reliable, and sensible—basically everything a commuter car should be.

With Spotify’s API, you can get hold of the core “Wrapped” data and use it however you want. A library simplifies the process, and a basic HTML version of Spotify Wrapped can be yours in 100 lines of code.

Single-board computers from companies like Raspberry Pi are perfect for homelab projects, retro gaming, or even use as a lightweight desktop PC replacement. But it’s also easy to get carried away and make mistakes that can lead to instability, data loss, and damage.

If you’re anything like me, you know how important it is to get ideas and to-dos out of your brain so you actually remember them later. After bringing the iconic smartwatch back this year, Pebble is hoping its next product will help in these situations. It’s a smart ring called the Index 01.

Nobody wants to believe their new phone is the best it will ever be on the day they bought it, but that’s the reality for many Android owners. However, if you use a Google Pixel, there’s a solid argument to be made that it gets better with time.

Firefox 146 is rolling out, bringing a major, long-awaited display improvement for users running Linux with the Wayland compositor. The newest build now natively supports fractional scaling on Linux, which should make the rendering experience much better and snappier.

Thunderbird, the desktop mail client developed by Mozilla, just released two new updates. Thunderbird 146 is rolling out today in the stable channel, and for those of you who need stability above all else, Thunderbird ESR just got an update to version 140.6.

A few weeks ago, my internet went down. Thankfully, my mobile internet was still working, so I was able to use my phone as a hotspot. Looking online, however, I found that many people who used the same provider for both their broadband and mobile internet had lost access to both and could not get online at all. There's always a risk that this could happen, but the good news is that an internet outage doesn't have to leave you offline.

Cooling power is the lifeblood of your PC. No matter how good any of your other components are, if things get too hot in there, your PC will struggle a lot. If you're struggling with cooling your CPU, you don't have to upgrade to a better cooler: you should try these less costly options first.

Home Assistant has its own built-in voice assistant called Assist. I use Home Assistant Cloud to handle the natural language processing, and Assist can work well for controlling devices, querying the state of entities, or playing media. It's far from perfect, but there are some things you can do to improve how well Assist understands what you're asking.

Chromebooks have come a long, long way since I first used one. It helps that so much of what we do every day happens in a browser, so, in a way, we've met Chromebooks halfway. Either way, it's entirely possible to use a Chromebook as your only computer. The question is, what are you giving up by doing so?

The text editor is the most critical tool in a programmer's arsenal, acting as the daily workbench, primary interface, and engine for creation. For years, Microsoft's Visual Studio Code (VS Code) has dominated, becoming the default choice for millions of developers across nearly every programming language and operating system.

The Ugreen DH2300 NAS has a budget-friendly price and all the makings of an entry-level network-attached storage device, but after trying to get my family to use it to back up their pictures and data, it might still be too technical for a mass audience.

A CPU cooler doesn't have to be expensive to be great. If you have a hot-running CPU, the ID-COOLING FROZN A620 PRO SE is all you really need. It's a chunky air cooler with two 120mm fans that do an excellent job at keeping your modern AMD Ryzen or Intel CPU cool without breaking the bank.

Network attached storage devices have become increasingly popular as people search for alternatives—or supplements—to their cloud storage subscriptions. That is where a new mini PC released by Youyeetoo, which is designed primarily for use as a miniature NAS, can shine.

PhpStorm has stuck around as one of the best PHP development environments, and now JetBrains has released a new major version. PhpStorm 2025.3 is now available with PHP 8.5 support, a new theme, Claude agent integration, and much more.

Are you shopping for an SBC right now? There are tons to choose from, but the conventional choice is a Raspberry Pi device. It isn't your only option, though, and looking into alternatives is worth your while.